


Run, Baby, Run

by mrsvc



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/F, Past Drug Addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-28 09:15:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrsvc/pseuds/mrsvc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forever We'll Be / You and Me</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run, Baby, Run

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Menacherie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Menacherie/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Beckah! 
> 
> Title and Summary from "Check Yes, Juliet" by We the Kings.

She moved back to Portland from Seattle on a Friday. She got lost in her new school at least twice, tore the hem on her knee-length skirt by catching it on a loose screw underneath a rickety table, and lost her lunch money when she accidentally dumped out her knapsack in Chemistry and shoved everything back in a rush of embarrassment.

Her parents thought the move would be good for her. The Calverts had lived in Oregon when she was a child, staying until Freddy graduated high school and took over the family tea shop, before they packed up a six year old Rosalee and headed to Seattle where her mother’s family lived. 

Her parents were older than most of peers’ and she was raised in a strict, but loving household. The drugs weren’t so much an act of rebellion as they were a misguided push at forgetting herself. She felt too small for her skin and wanted anything that could fill in those gaps. She tried make-up, sports, picking up an instrument, joining a couple of clubs. She tried boys, and girls, and figured out she liked the second one much better than the first. She tried pulling away entirely, burying herself in her father’s tea shop and hoping no one would notice her suffering quietly in the background if she just kept her head down. 

Jay, though. Jay took all of that away. Jay made her feel transcendent. Jay took away her pain. Jay stopped her from feeling frail and small and made her feel like she could take on the world. What she found lacking within herself as a person, she smoothed over with a judicious application of whatever form of Jay she could get her hands on. She had actually done a fairly good job at being a functioning addict - her grades never wavered, her social abilities skyrocketed, and her self-esteem was never higher. 

Where her addiction plagued her most was at home. She grew despondent and almost downright hateful to her parents. She stole money from her father’s wallet to pay for her growing tolerance to the pills and then lied about it right to her mother’s face. It all came to a head when  
she was arrested at a drug bust but a couple of cops, who saw the ground up Jay she was snorting with a rolled five dollar bill and thought it was oxy. When the tests came back negative for everything, even though she was clearly high, the police were forced to release her and she was met with the stern glares of her parents on the other side of the county lock-up glass doors. 

They cleaned her up the hard way - the old way, her father said - and let her sweat it out in the back room of the tea shop, with just her father’s herbs to soothe her way. When she came out of it on the other side, weaker than she had felt before she had ever had her first taste of Jay, her parents had packed her up and drove right back to Portland. 

Now she was back to being that girl who couldn’t quite match her clothes and couldn’t quite stop the buzzing inside her head. She couldn’t remember any of the kids she had known in pre-school and none of them admitted to remembering her. She just breezed through her classes, stumbling through the requisite new kid introductions with mild smiles and downcast eyes. She was not a wilting flower, not anymore, but she would rather stay under the radar here. She wanted to graduate next year and leave the entire west coast. She thought Maine would be nice - quiet, rural, and isolated. She could fall deeper into herself there and not have to worry about the expectations of a society she didn’t feel primed and ready to enter. 

 

Monroe remembered her, though, in his own Monroe way. He sat down next to her at a table one afternoon and said, “Your brother’s Freddy, right? Runs the tea shop?” 

“I can’t get you a discount,” she answered, picking at the crust on her sandwich. 

“No, no, God, no. I don’t want a discount. I just- Rosalee, right? Rosalee Calvert? I’m Monroe. I used to watch your brother play ball, when my brother was on the team with him. We were, like, three, granted. I think we used to sit on a picnic blanket together. I’m sure if I asked my mom, she could dig up a picture to prove it.” 

Rose stared at him for a moment, unsure of how to take him, and Monroe fiddled with the buttons on his cardigan. He was tall, his arms and fingers too long for the rest of him, and she wondered if he knew how beautiful his eyes were. Probably not, from the crippling awkwardness she felt in the air between them, and she took pity on him. “Yeah, I think I remember that.” 

He smiled in relief and started to unpack his lunch, chattering away about the good old glory days of Portland’s high school baseball league. “Can’t keep anyone on a team now. They all commit to play in those travel shark leagues now. You know, the ones that are just a stepping stone away from a first round major league draft pick.”

He kind of dogged her steps for the rest of the day, a steady stream of nonsense in her ear while he surreptitiously guided her to the right rooms for her classes. It takes him two weeks to ask to see her, to really see her, in her woge state. She does it, because it’s a quid pro quo in most wesen friendships, and while he probably knows she’s a Fuchsbau because he knows Freddy, she has no memory of him. She’s not shocked that he’s a Blutbad, but she is shocked that he held her hand before he woged, as if she would be frightened of him. 

She knew something was fishy was when held her hand again as they approached a beautiful boy in a leather jacket leaning against Monroe’s car after school one day. He was younger than them - a freshman to their junior - but he looked up at the both of them with confidence, and glanced at their conjoined hands with a mildly amused and slightly disapproving flick of his eyes. 

“I go out of town for one week and you move on. I’m wounded.” 

Monroe huffed and punched the younger boy in the arm, cheeks coloring slightly. He made a vague gesture towards Rose, what she supposed was her cue, and said, “Rose, Nick. Be nice.” Monroe directed the last part at Nick who held his hands up in the universal sign of submission and smiled charmingly at her. 

“Any friend of Monroe’s is a friend of mine.” 

He had the kind of predatory grace that made Rose think he was a fellow Blutbaden, perhaps one of Monroe’s pack mates, and she woged for him out of courtesy. She dropped his hand like it was a hot brand and tried to run away when she saw how terribly wrong she had been. 

Monroe grabbed her by the shoulders, putting himself between Nick and her, and said, “Yeah, I know, it happens every time” over his shoulder at Nick’s pouting. “He’s a Grimm, but yes, he’s not that kind of Grimm. He’s a good one.” 

Rose struggled once more and Monroe released her. She watched Nick tug on the back of Monroe’s shirt and Monroe took a step to the left, resting his hip right beside Nick’s on the car. 

“I really hate when people do that.” Rose stared at the boy, unable to reconcile the Grimm with the petulance in his voice. She had been told all of the tales as a little girl - keep yourself hidden, don’t tell anyone who you are, don’t draw attention to yourself - but she had always imagined something different when she faced her first real-life Grimm. She thought there would be more running and screaming for her life, not staring in disbelief as a kid with a bad haircut was trying really hard not to stick his tongue down her best friend’s throat. 

“Get used to it,” Rose said, mostly from shock. She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth, thinking they would upset him and he would prove himself to be that kind of Grimm, but instead he just smiled, and bumped shoulders with Monroe. 

“I like her.”

Monroe, apparently the weaker of the two, laid a hand on Nick’s thigh and squeezed. “I knew you would.” 

That’s how she passed through the first couple of months of her junior year - riding in the backseat of Monroe’s yellow Beetle, futzing around town to find the place that sells the best French fries in Portland, and trying not to gag on her own tongue when they would hold hands while Monroe was driving. 

In the second semester, she ended up in Biology, sharing a desk with a wide-eyed red-head who introduced herself as Juliette. She talked through the whole period to Rose about how excited she was for when they got to dissect the animals and Rose couldn’t help but be drawn slightly into the excitement. Where many of the other students in the room made a moue of distaste at the thought of formaldehyde clinging to their clothes and rubber gloves leaving their fingertips pruned, Juliette almost vibrated joy. Rose felt at ease around her, even when Juliette clasped her arm between her lithe fingers and squeezed a little, smiling at the news that they would be teaming up for their dissections.

Juliette told Rose about her mom and dad, her sister, and her bevy of cousins and aunts and uncles.They talked at length about various classes they were taking, bemoaning the fact that they could be in Government together if Juliette was doubling up on science this quarter and taking Anatomy. She said she wanted to be a vet when she grew up, then wrinkled her nose. “I think that’s a stupid phrase, when I grow up. Maybe I don’t ever want to grow up.”

She told Juliette about Seattle, making it sound much more exciting and less sodden and drizzly than her reality had been. She talked about Freddy and the Christmas her parents gave her a pair of roller skates and Freddy broke her nose trying to lead her by a jump rope down the sidewalk. Juliette laughed in all the right spots, touched Rose’s hand lightly when Rose would start to draw back again, and ended up demanding her cell phone and programming her number into Rose’s contacts. 

It made Rose feel a little less small to have Juliette’s eyes on her. 

Nick, because he was a freshmen, had a different lunch period than Rose and Monroe, but in a surprisingly forward thinking move, he switched his schedule around for his study hall to coincide with their lunch and often skipped out of the class with a library pass and sat in the cafeteria with them. 

“Don’t let him fool you,” Monroe had said. “He’s on the honor roll.” 

Juliette had asked her about him the next day, shifting nervously in her seat, twirling the ends of her hair between her fingers absently. “So, you know Nick Burkhardt, huh?” 

Rose looked up from her textbook and glanced quickly over at her new... tablemate. She wanted desperately to call them friends, but there was this divide that still rolled between them. Juliette was incredibly smart, but she wore it better than Rose. She was beautiful, poised, eloquent in turns, and also incredibly witty and fun to be around. She was the embodiment of everything Rose assumed she was never going to be good enough for, even when she had been the Other Rose. 

Juliette, like Nick, was popular, beautiful, and meant for so much more. 

“Yeah,” Rose answered, nose almost touching the pages of the worksheet they were supposed to be concentrating on.

“Is he, you know - “ 

“Available?” 

Juliette blushed and Rose’s stomach bottomed out. She felt like being cruel - letting Juliette think that Nick was and letting her make a fool of herself - but the sinking feeling leveled out and Rose let her shoulders sag in defeat. 

“No,” she whispered back. “He’s with someone.”

Juliette picked at her nails silently for a moment before following up with, “with you?” 

Rose choked a little, hands tightening suddenly on her pencil, and she looked at Juliette intensely. “No. God, no. He’s not- Me?” 

Juliette smiled again, and Rose wanted to read relief in the lines of it, but she felt like that was projecting. “It would make sense,” Juliette countered. “You guys sit together at lunch, and you’re always hanging out together. I see you guys walking in the halls together all the time.” 

“No, no. Listen, why don’t you.... come out with us? All we do is get burgers. You can talk to him and he can tell you. I don’t want to... be the one who is telling secrets that aren’t mine to tell.” Nick and Monroe tended to not do big displays of emotion at school. They liked it better when the entire world wasn’t butting their noses into their business. Rose, as their joint best friend, was often the only one who got to see the rare moments of physical affection between the two of them. 

Juliette balked a little at the idea, the customary “I don’t want to intrude” argument already spilling from her lips, but Rose grabbed her wrist. “You can come as my guest. Come on, it’s just burgers.” 

Juliette texts her address to Rose between periods and there’s a part of Rose that wants to break down and cry and another part that wants to call her brother and ask him if he’s gotten any girls’ addresses lately. 

Rose made Monroe let her drive, avoiding looking in the backseat after Nick figured out the advantages to that, and pulled up to Juliette’s driveway, her chest aching with anxiety. 

“Don’t worry so much,” Nick said bracingly, pulling away from Monroe in the backseat. “She’s going to love you. And if she doesn’t, there’s lot of other-”

“She has a crush on you,” Rose blurted out. “So I invited her out so she could meet you. Oh, my God.” 

Monroe made a distressed noise and Nick let his head fall into his hands. “Rosie!”

“I panicked.” 

Juliette slid into the passenger seat a moment later, an awkward wave and smile to Nick and Monroe, and Rose focused on breathing all the way to the diner. She wanted just a pinch of Jay, just one pill, anything to take away the clawing desperation in her chest, and she had to forcibly remind herself that Old Rose, Other Rose, wouldn’t have been friends with these people. 

Nick charmed Juliette, of course, but he did so with his fingers wrapped around Monroe’s, and maybe that was the best way for this to happen. They faked an emergency, and after a lot of really intense whispering and silent looks, Monroe left Rose his keys and let Nick drag him from the diner. 

“So, that’s what you didn’t want to tell me. It’s okay, I get why. They’re really cute, though. Of course you know that, you hang out with them all the time.” 

Rose kept her eyes on the design she was drawing in her ketchup with her French fry. Juliette kept talking, filling in all the blanks in the conversation she was leaving hanging. She replied as best as she could, with the hole eating away at her stomach, and even managed to smile a few times at Juliette just for being her. 

The drive home was mostly silent, Juliette worrying at the strap on her small purse, lips pursed in a pout that Rose found distracting for more than a few reasons. The lights were off at the Silvertons’ when they pulled up, and Juliette made an off-hand remark that her parents go to sleep really early, it’s almost weird, before she lapsed into silence again. 

“Look, Rosalee,” she said after a few minutes, twisting in her seat to face her friend. “Did you ask me out just to show me Nick and Monroe or did you ask me out because you like me?” 

“I -”

“But see, I think maybe somewhere in this, we didn’t say the right words or something, but I think you think that I was asking about Nick, but I wasn’t. I was asking about you. I thought you were dating him and I didn’t want to show all my cards, you know, by asking you directly. That can get you trouble if you ask a girl the wrong kind of question, you know.” 

“Jul -” 

“I’m sorry, it’s just that - I like you, okay? You. And it’s been... weird because I thought you liked me too. But tonight, you could barely even talk to me. Just... tell me, okay? Tell you don’t like girls. Tell me you’ve got a boyfriend back in Seattle you text every night when you aren’t texting me. Tell me you just don’t like me. That’s all fine. I just... Tell me?” 

Rosalee let her mind wander for a minute, rolling the implications of Juliette’s words between her metaphorical fingers and thinking about a future where they could be the disgusting ones in the back seat, making out while Monroe pretends to hide his eyes and Nick outright leers at them. They could wrap their arms around each other, and tuck each other’s hair behind their ears as they kiss in hidden hallways. She could have a future where Rose isn’t just the weird girl with a penchant for chemistry and a history of drug abise. They could be so much more than Other Rose could have ever dreamed of being, or ever having.

“Juliette, I -” Her face fell at the tone and Rose hastened to finish her sentence. “I like you too. Always have. But I come with baggage. Nick and Monroe don’t even know, but it’s stuff I’ll tell you about someday. Stuff that might make you see me a lot differently than you do right now. Stuff that might make you regret being with me. I can’t... tell you now. I’m not strong enough now to tell you, but.... I’d still like to try. I want you to be the one who helps me be strong enough to say it.” 

Juliette’s whole face had brightened with her smile and Rose could swear that all of the cliches she’s ever heard about powering the world with one person’s grin are true. Juliette was radiant in the dim light of the moon, eyes dancing, and her hands shaking a little from nerves and her own, uncontainable excitement. “Are you going to kiss me?”she asked, giggling at little at the end of the sentence and Rose couldn’t hold back. She had to kiss that grin and seal it inside of herself, absorb a little but of the giddiness that suffused Juliette and hoard it up in her heart for rainy days, for bad days, for craving days. Juliette bracketed Rose’s face with her soft hands and laughed into their kisses. 

They only stopped when the porch lights started to flicker on and off ahead of them and Juliette poured herself from Monroe’s tiny car with a flush on her cheeks that Rose was wildly proud of herself for putting there. 

“I like you,” Juliette said again, like Rose needed reminding. Maybe she looked like she did. It didn’t matter, anyway, because Rose jumped at the chance. 

“I like you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Un-beta'd


End file.
